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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Honestly, until the 5.5e controversy reared its head, I hadn't even considered the issues with making races feel thematic after the "swap abilities wherever you want" rules change: I was much more focused on having a lot more exciting build space, because 5e characters feel so shallow that any way to get more customization and interesting mechanical parts of a character was a big deal.

I wonder if that's part of the reason there's not more outcry against this, that established players are just excited to have more customization levers again. Because it's really easy to get through 5e and kind of be "done" with archetypes: you just don't have that many decision points to make in a lot of them. When you've played your third Variant Human Fighter (this time with a halberd!), getting to usefully play a Tiefling Fighter feels like a breath of fresh air.

I think the real thing a lot of these players want is a deeper system, where being "dwarf" doesn't mean you're doing the same thing every time: you can be a big tough mountain guy but play to different parts of that for different characters and thus "dwarf fighter" doesn't define most of your character. Pathfinder 2e's racial feats seem like they cover this, but mainstream D&D clearly wants to be a lot simpler.